Every Second Counts at Ever, the Chicago Restaurant Where Richie Stages in ‘The Bear’

There’s a crystallizing moment in “Forks,” the seventh episode of The Bear’s second season, when Cousin Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) discovers the gift.

As an unpaid stagiaire for Ever, a three-Michelin-star Chicago restaurant, Richie works a shift trailing the front-of-house staff, keeping his eyes and ears attuned to the wants and needs of the guests. He catches wind of a table’s passive lament about not having a chance to try deep-dish pizza during their time in Chicago; the solution is to bring deep-dish to them. Richie makes an impromptu trek to Pequod’s and returns with a whole pie. This is a fine-dining establishment, though, so Ever’s chef de cuisine promptly springs into action, composing a new dish on a plate: varying cylindrical, ring-mold cutouts of the pizza, flash toasted under a salamander broiler; dots of basil gel left over from the hamachi course on the menu; micro basil—fuck yes! Richie does the honors of delivering the pizza, gliding around the dining room and slipping the plate behind his back à la Pistol Pete before delivering the dish. The table’s shock and gratitude imbue Richie with that elusive, ineffable sense of purpose that he’d been seeking since the first episode of the season.

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“That’s really the difference between waiting tables and loving what you do the way we do it—it’s finding those moments to blow people away,” Michael Muser, the co-owner of Ever, tells The Ringer. Muser runs the actual Ever—the two-Michelin-star (though they certainly have their eyes on a third) Chicago restaurant that serves as the backdrop and inspiration for one of the best episodes of television this year. “What I loved about our episode of The Bear was that this kind of hardened character was shown the power of gift. In the show, it was represented in a Pequod’s pizza. And that’s silly, but, honestly, we’ve done sillier things.”

Take the group of friends who could not stop joking among themselves about how out of place they felt eating at Ever, in a dining room with artisanal walls coated in Venetian plaster. Any other weekend, they’d be on a porch knocking back some Budweisers. Budweiser. Budweiser. “The word ‘Budweiser’ was used like a million times,” Muser says. So, the Ever staff sent a back waiter down to the Walgreens a mile away to pick up a case of the lager, which they served as a beverage pairing for the beef course.

“They loved it,” Muser says. “It’s silly. It’s a joke. It’s funny. It’s a Budweiser. We were listening to you. But the staff gets the mojo off that, man. We’re the designers of the ‘wow’ moment. That’s our gift.”

In The Bear, Ever is “the greatest restaurant in the world,” helmed by Chef Terry (played with serenity by the queen Olivia Colman), who fine-tunes its practices over the course of a decade. In reality, Ever—which first opened its doors in the summer of 2020, squarely in the throes of the pandemic—has as much in common with the show’s titular restaurant-to-be as it does with the monolith that The Bear portrays it as.

Still, even in its infancy, Ever proved to be the ideal location for showcasing the pinnacle of fine dining. Chicago executive chef Matt Danko, who had worked under Muser and chef Curtis Duffy at their previous three-Michelin-star restaurant, Grace, is one of the culinary consultants on The Bear; back in January, when location scouts asked him for a local restaurant with a beautiful dining room, Ever was the first one that came to mind. “And like everything in Chicago,” Muser says, “it just kind of comes out, serendipitously, through the network of Chicago that’s in you, you know?”

Within days, a full production crew of around 25 people descended upon Ever. A small stack of NDAs was signed, and Ever agreed to shut down for a week, turning off its online reservation system to accommodate the filming schedule. Months later, days before the shoot, producer and food stylist Courtney “Coco” Storer brought her crew to observe the restaurant in full swing, prepping for a service of 60 covers. “Our kitchen is fully staffed, and they are moving; the front of the house is everywhere, and they are moving. It is set up and prepped,” Muser says. “And Coco looks around, and she looks over at me, and she goes, ‘I want all of this.’”

On the day of the shoot, Ever’s staff prepped a set number of dishes to be filmed. “The front-of-house staff that you see, that’s our staff, all the kitchen guys,” Muser says. “Duffy’s hands are in it; Curtis was here the entire time, plated everything.” The costume department asked Muser about the front-of-house uniforms; there were no complaints when the actual staff trotted out in their immaculately tailored suits.

The stark aesthetic of Ever—which my colleague Justin Charity aptly describes as “reminiscent of the Death Star”—lends itself to Richie’s evolution as he dons his suit and assumes a new identity, creating a borderline cheesy montage you might see in your favorite heist film. Of course, what’s being shot is the inverse of a heist: The restaurant itself is the crown jewel, and the drama is in how its splendor is brought to its rightful recipients.

Ever’s actual origins, however, hew closer to the death-by-a-thousand-permits chaos depicted in the show. While The Bear’s first season extracted maximal levels of tension from the claustrophobic, mile-a-minute head rush of working in a commercial kitchen (to uneven results), Season 2 more successfully mines the frustration of the intangible: of bureaucracy, of unforeseen disasters, of how the kitchen—in a restaurant of all places!—is often the last thing one can worry about when it comes to building an establishment from the ground up. And then, there is the ever-looming fear of taking on such an endeavor amid so many closures in an industry, fictional or otherwise, that is still licking its wounds from one of the biggest public health disasters in human history.

“You ask me what it was like to build Ever restaurant. Things were going just swimmingly until COVID showed up,” Muser says. “And that just wreaked havoc with the last 50 percent of getting the restaurant completed, which is to say nothing of the weird psychological game that you’re building a restaurant in a moment in time where nine out of 10 of your friends think that restaurants will never return again. And we’re in the process of building one and promoting it and telling everybody, like, This is gonna be the most amazing thing in the whole wide world. And everyone’s looking at us like, Are you stupid?”

Ever finished construction just as the city of Chicago allowed for restaurants to serve indoors at 25-percent capacity. Since the restaurant was hemorrhaging money, there was no time to waste; they opened it as soon as they could. A few months later, the omicron variant prompted another lockdown. Ever pivoted to burgers as a lifeline, just as the Bear reinstituted a daytime Italian beef takeaway to expand its margins by even a microscopic degree. (Ever’s cerebral twist on the all-American classic? Fries treated in such a way that they’d crisp up when reheated in the microwave.) Every second counts. So does every dollar.

“I think if you say pivot to a restaurant person, they might shiver or twitch a little bit,” Muser says. “We went through that phase, as did everyone. We fought for survival, as did everyone. We did the best we could to pay our rent. We scaled down to only the essential humans and ran that bank account damn near zero, brother.”

For all the criticisms that The Bear has engendered due to its depiction of restaurant life, the show navigates the exasperating drama of restaurant building quite accurately. Yes, money will dry up faster than you can imagine. Yes, you do need to set a wildly improbable opening date just to apply pressure to the contractors involved in the project. (“Those deadlines exist, and they’re real,” Muser says.) Yes, there will be conflicting bylaws from different branches of city government that make it damn near impossible for the restaurant to be up to code. Yes, the menu is important, and it will soon be what the reception of the restaurant is based upon, but in the early stages, it’s a dream deferred.

“It is so weird because when you’re building, you’re a builder. You’re not a chef when you’re building. You are in construction,” Muser says. “So HVAC is your life. Plumbing is your life. And then what’s weird is that the second that thing’s done, now you get to clock in as an operator. And if you’re talking about ground up, the next move is to hire and train. So you have to be a great human resource person. You have to be a good manager. I mean, I’m describing a superhuman, basically.”

In a discipline that requires a high degree of obsessiveness and control, it’s no wonder that restaurateurs end up having to dive deep into the more blue-collar elements of the job—and, as a prissy chef or a snooty sommelier who is trying to build a restaurant, sometimes that means picking up on details that even the construction pros miss. Ever’s fingerprints are all over this season of The Bear; the other season highlight, “Honeydew,” was filmed at Ever’s sister bar, After. Of course, Muser has a horror story about the construction of that place, too.

Before the bar was even a twinkle in Muser’s and Duffy’s eyes, it was an empty lot right next to the restaurant. On the lot, the pair had noticed a 4-foot pipe sticking out from the ground. And when it stormed, the pipe would spit water 25 feet into the air, like a geyser. Upon renting the space to build After, Muser and Duffy made it known at the first owner, architect, and contractor meeting that there was a serious issue afoot. “See this pipe?” Muser recalls saying to the engineers, managers, contractors, and plumbers in the room. “This pipe is fucked.” Duffy then sent a video of the pipe in action to every person at the meeting to make sure they were aware of the problem.

“The bar gets built. It’s mostly done; it’s beautiful,” Muser explained on an episode of his podcast, Amuzed: A Podcast for Geniuses. “And then it rains. We get a big rain. And water comes up everywhere. Every toilet, every floor drain. They plugged the whole system into the one pipe I said to look out for.” The issue was resolved by an independent plumber who echoed Muser’s sentiments: Oh yeah, this is fucked. “Meanwhile, all the educated builders have amnesia,” Muser says.

But perhaps chaos, in all its manifestations, is the point. Discipline isn’t born from nothing, nor is a sense of camaraderie. If you can survive water spurting from every orifice of the building—if you can survive a night’s worth of covers with your head chef locked in the walk-in freezer—what else can you survive? What else is possible? By the end of “Forks,” Richie buys in. Through Ever, he sees his future within the chaos. The Bear is no longer the leviathan preying on the obsolete and those without purpose; it’s an opportunity for renewal. Richie returns from Ever with lasting mementos: the power of gift and an understanding of what makes a restaurant experience exceptional.

The Ever staff is prepping as I talk to Muser on the phone, readying themselves for the night’s service. For the first time in the restaurant’s existence, he feels solid about where they are. There are three back waiters at Ever, all of whom have been a part of the staff for two years—long enough to develop a laser focus. Their eyes are perceptive to changes in beverage levels; their ears are open, ready to listen for potential “wow” moments. And after the first year, when it was rare for cooks to stay in the kitchen for longer than a week, the restaurant has found continuity with its chefs, too. It all takes time, which not nearly enough restaurants in this world are afforded. Ever, in fact and in fiction, is one of the lucky ones. In its example, we see an outline of what the Bear could become.

“In their fictitious story, they mentioned this recipe of success. It makes me feel good because it’s what we aspire to be. Like, what they describe in the show, I can promise you, in our hearts, it’s what we feel we are,” Muser says. “We’re just on the way there. We’re in process, but in our hearts, we come to work every single day at the greatest restaurant in the world, bar none. I mean, we have to feel that way.”